'A Beautiful Mind' Mathematician John Nash and His Wife Killed in New Jersey Taxi Crash - ABC News ABC News 'A Beautiful Mind' Mathematician John Nash and His Wife Killed in New Jersey Taxi Crash By EMILY SHAPIRO May 24, 2015, 10:25 PM ET 0 Shares WATCH Genius Portrayed in 'A Beautiful Mind' Dies in Accident on New Jersey Turnpike 0 Shares Email Princeton University mathematician and Nobel Prize winner John Nash, whose life was the subject of the film "A Beautiful Mind," was killed in a taxi crash along with his wife in New Jersey on Saturday. Nash and Alicia Nash were in a taxi on the New Jersey Turnpike when the driver lost control and crashed into a guard rail, said New Jersey State Police Sgt. Gregory Williams. Nash was 86; his wife was 82. Authorities don't believe Nash or his wife were wearing seat belts since they were both ejected from the taxi, Williams said. The couple lived in Princeton, New Jersey. No charges were expected, according to Middlesex County Prosecutor spokesman Jim O'Neill.

Gary Miller/Getty Images Mathematician and Nobel Prize winner John Nash (L) and his wife Alicia Nash attend a screening of 'A Beautiful Mind' at the Alamo Drafthouse on Sept. 16, 2012 in Austin, Texas. Nash won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1994 and worked as a senior research mathematician at Princeton University. His life story, including his struggles with paranoid schizophrenia, were portrayed by Russell Crowe in the 2001 film "A Beautiful Mind," which won four Oscars including Best Picture. "Stunned...my heart goes out to John & Alicia & family. An amazing partnership. Beautiful minds, beautiful hearts," Crowe posted on Twitter today. The Nashes also became recognized for their work in mental health care advocacy. Earlier this week, Nash was in Norway to receive the Abel Prize for mathematics, according to NJ.com . The Abel Prize, awarded by the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, recognized his work on partial differential equations. Getty Images Princeton University campus in New Jersey is seen in this undated stock image. Princeton University President Christopher L.

Eisgruber said in a statement: "We are stunned and saddened by news of the untimely passing of John Nash and his wife and great champion, Alicia. Both of them were very special members of the Princeton University community. John's remarkable achievements inspired generations of mathematicians, economists and scientists who were influenced by his brilliant, groundbreaking work in game theory, and the story of his life with Alicia moved millions of readers and moviegoers who marveled at their courage in the face of daunting challenges." 0 Shares John Forbes Nash Jr.: 'A Beautiful Mind' Subject Killed in Taxi Crash John Nash and his wife, Alicia Nash, died Saturday + READ ARTICLE John Forbes Nash Jr., the subject of the 2001 Oscar-winning film A Beautiful Mind, and his wife were killed Saturday in a taxi crash on the New Jersey Turnpike, police said. Nash, 86, and Alicia Nash, 82, were in the taxi when the driver lost control and crashed into a guardrail, NJ.com reported. No charges were expected to be filed in the crash, according to the Middlesex County prosecutor’s office.

Nash, a longtime resident of Princeton Junction, N.J., won the 1994 Nobel Prize in Economics for his work on game theory. His genius in economics and mathematics, in addition to his struggle with schizophrenia, became the subject of his 1998 biography, which years later inspired the film A Beautiful Mind. The actor Russell Crowe, who played Nash in the movie, posted his condolences on Twitter, calling them “beautiful minds, beautiful hearts.” Stunned…my heart goes out to John & Alicia & family. An amazing partnership. Beautiful minds, beautiful hearts. ‎A Beautiful Mind (2001) directed by Ron Howard • Reviews, film + cast • Letterboxd This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth. "So what am I now, a spy?" Not only did I manage not to have this movie spoiled for me, but despite it being a favorite of my father's and girlfriend's I managed to block out the knowledge that there was even anything to spoil about it. Before the movie started my dad even said something along the lines of, "It's never the same as the first time you see it." Thank you, brain, for selectively understanding the world around me.

There's a section of this movie which is absolutely terrifying to me, more than any horror movie I've ever seen. A Beautiful Mind plays out the idea that you can't think your way out of mental illness. There's a… 3 A Beautiful Mind is a beautiful film. Russell Crowe somehow looked much younger in this than he did in Gladiator which came out a year before. This movie was so wonderful and really plays with the audience's feelings. I was either really happy, really surprised, or really concerned. A film that directors in present cinema should make more of. I love stories about characters like this, and really would like to see more! Review by Dave ★★★★ Before "Noah" came along, Russell Crowe and Jennifer Connelly owned this highly entertaining drama about the life of John Nash. Rather than play it like a straight biopic, Ron Howard chose to go inside Nash’s schizophrenic mind, and the results are dazzling. Crowe, disappearing once again, adds another enigmatic role to his roster of great performances. He should have won Oscars for "The Insider" and this film, not for "Gladiator," but I digress. He's easily one of our best actors-slash-movie stars in the business.

And Jennifer Connelly? Well, dammit, she can do no wrong, can she? Review by Tom Urrutia One of my New Year's resolutions is to watch every Best Picture winner that I had not previously seen. My quest begins with 2002's Best Picture winner A BEAUTIFUL MIND in addition to Best Director, (Ron Howard) Best Supporting Actress, (Jennifer Connelly) and Best Adapted Screenplay. (Akiva Goldstein, who also wrote BATMAN & ROBIN.....) Review by Pandora 4 ★★★★ A nice way to end the year. 2016, despite what many people seem to be saying, was not that bad of a year, in my humble opinion. In terms of movies, I think it was a step up from 2015. People complaining about politics should stop, because if 2016 taught us nothing else, its that we still live in a democracy, controlled by and for the people- which honestly should by something to rejoice, whatever your leanings. In terms of my own life, it was a successful and happy year for me.

Maybe this in due in part to the fact that I don't let the deaths of famous people who I've never met or ever would have met, ruin my day (or year). Sorry. I'm not sure I'll continue being that active on this site in 2017. So if I don't see you for awhile, this is Pandora 4 saying peace out. Sylvia Nasar on John Nash | Books | The Guardian Biography The sum of a man On Sunday John Nash basked in adulation as A Beautiful Mind, the film based on his life, collected the Oscar for best picture. But his reputation has recently taken a battering: he's been called an anti-semite, an adulterer and a lousy father. So what is the truth about the mathematical genius who recovered from decades of schizophrenia to win a Nobel prize?

Sylvia Nasar, his biographer, knows better than most Despite having stars such as Russell Crowe (pictured here in A Beautiful Mind) pretending to be mathematicians, students are struggling with mathematics Sylvia Nasar Share on Messenger Close It was a beautiful night at the Oscars for A Beautiful Mind, the Ron Howard movie starring Russell Crowe as a mathematical genius John Nash who triumphed over three decades of schizophrenia to win a Nobel prize. After what the New York Times called the "dirtiest Oscar campaign in recent memory", the romantic drama inspired by my 1998 biography took all but one of the most glittering prizes for which it had been nominated - best picture, best director, best adapted screenplay, best supporting actress. It was also a beautiful night for the man portrayed by Russell Crowe. In recent weeks, Nash, 73, who lives near Princeton, New Jersey, had become the target of a smear campaign by critics of the film who argued that, in contrast to Crowe's sympathetic character, the real man was no hero. Distorting and even inventing "facts" supposedly in the book, reporters and reviewers at major news organisations called Nash everything from an adulterer to an anti-semite.

But the attacks also spurred those of us who know Nash and the facts of his life to correct the record. After spending a day and a half interviewing Nash and his family, veteran CBS correspondent Mike Wallace told Larry King: "One of the most obvious ways to go after [the film] is to try to call John Nash an anti-semite, raging homosexual, bad father. He is none of those things." Last night's triumph was a vindication not only for the film-makers but for the film's subject. Nash, wearing black tie and sitting with his wife Alicia, looked both pleased and slightly bemused as winner after winner saluted him. This morning on the phone, talking from his room at the St Regis in Los Angeles, Nash remarked that there were some similarities between the Oscar and the Nobel prize, namely that both involved academies and "a lot of politics". How will it affect his life? "I'm going to sign autographs now," he said, "I haven't been signing any autographs since 1994." It never ceases to amaze me that Nash and I are now friends.

During the three years I worked on the biography, he refused to grant me a formal interview, saying that he was adopting "a position of Swiss neutrality". But he was not averse to chatting informally when we met on social occasions and did not discourage his family and friends from cooperating; after the book was published, he invited me to a party. It's been incredible for me to witness his getting his life back bit by bit. Among other things, we went together to the first Broadway play Nash had seen (Amy's View with Judi Dench). Listening to him this morning, I once again felt astonished at the way the remarkable third act of Nash's life has continued to unfold. It is almost impossible to believe that 10 or 15 years ago this witty man with his air of boyish innocence was so sick that he was haunting the Princeton campus in mismatched plaids and red high-top sneakers, scribbling weird but witty messages on blackboards (I agree with Harvard! There is a brain flat!?).

Or that when I first learned about his life, as an economics reporter for the New York Times, more than a year before he won the Nobel, he was still afraid to look anyone in the eye, his front teeth rotted. Like the hero of a Greek tragedy, he had fallen, not from a stepladder, but from a star. Nash was just 20, with movie-star looks and an Olympian manner, when he burst on to the mathematical scene in 1947. Within 14 months of his arrival at Princeton, he had invented a revolutionary theory of human conflict and cooperation that would eventually win him a Nobel prize. By 30, his stunning achievements in pure mathematics and his flamboyant behaviour made him a celebrity in the world of mathematics. Like the actor who plays him in the movie, Nash was "a bad boy, but a great one", according to a fellow mathematician. One rival said he was, "Obnoxious. Immature. A brat. What redeemed him was a keen logical beautiful mind." Contrary to widespread references to Nash's "numerous homosexual liaisons", he was not gay.

While he had several emotionally intense relationships with other men when he was in his early 20s, I never interviewed anyone who claimed, much less provided evidence, that Nash ever had sex with another man. True, Nash was arrested in a police trap in a public lavatory in Santa Monica in 1954, at the height of the McCarthy hysteria. The military think-tank where he was a consultant, stripped him of his top-secret security clearance and fired him, ignoring Nash's flat denial and saying it "didn't really matter whether the cops were telling the truth or not". The charge - indecent exposure - was dropped. Various newspapers have alluded to "Nash's adultery". As a young instructor at MIT, Nash did have an affair with a nurse five years his senior and had a child with her. The book makes clear, however, that his affair with the mother of his older son was over by the time he married Alicia Larde. Entertainment Weekly's assertion that Nash was "a lousy father" is also false.

While it's true that Nash behaved irresponsibly toward his elder son, who as a consequence spent several years in foster care, Nash always acknowledged his fatherhood and tried to stay in touch with his son, even during his long illness. Since his recovery, they have formed a close relationship. For many years, moreover, Nash has cared for his younger son who has suffered from schizophrenia for more than 25 years, and who has always lived with Nash and his wife. Indeed, Nash's chief reason for allowing Ron Howard's movie was the opportunity to provide at last for Alicia and his two adult sons. The actual story of Nash's miraculous triumph over schizophrenia is much more convoluted than the screen version, but the film's depiction of his disease and re-emergence is substantially true. In many ways, Nash's illness was a classic case of paranoid schizophrenia. Some of his peers were convinced that the early stages of the illness manifested themselves in graduate school, but the full-blown symptoms did not erupt until he was 30, just as he was about to be promoted to full professor at MIT.

He told the chairman of a rival department that he wouldn't be able to accept an offer because: "I am scheduled to become the emperor of Antarctica." The most damaging charge during the Oscar campaign was that of bigotry. The New York Post, quoting a letter written by Nash in 1967, called him a "rabid anti-semite". Here are the facts: In his 20s, Nash's most ardent champions in the mathematics community were Norbert Wiener, Solomon Lefschetz, and Norman Levinson, all victims of the anti-semitism. The letter the Post quotes was written eight years after Nash was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia - at a time when he not only blamed his illness on Jews and the state of Israel, but also believed himself to be Job, a slave in chains, and a messiah living, not in his mother's home in Roanoke, Virginia, but in hell, refugee camps, bomb shelters and prisons. These were signs of paranoid delusions. Like so many people who suffer from schizophrenia, Nash did not believe that he was sick.

As his illness deepened in the early 60s, he accused Alicia of wanting to lock him away, and eventually made plans to return to Europe without her. Exhausted and depressed, struggling to raise her son, Alicia obtained a divorce in 1963. Nonetheless, she continued to see him, visited him when he was again hospitalised, and rallied support for him. Nash never stopped pining for Alicia, and she never really let him go. After his mother's death in 1970, when he had no one else in the world to turn to, he wrote to Alicia and begged her to shelter him. Astonishingly, she agreed. She took his own declared needs - for safety, freedom, friendship - literally. "That's what you need," she said later. "Being taken care of and not too much pressure." Powerful new drugs such as clozapine played no role in Nash's recovery. Another kind of chemistry apparently did, however. Like fewer than one in 10 individuals who suffer from chronic schizophrenia for decades, Nash "emerged from irrational thinking ultimately without medicine other than the natural hormonal changes of aging", as he later put it.

In the movie, Russell Crowe's Nash says that he went on "a diet of the mind". People who suffer from the illness say they too struggle consciously against their delusions. "Gradually I began to intellectually reject some of the delusionally influenced lines of thinking," Nash has said. Like love, willpower alone isn't enough to cure schizophrenia. But psychiatrists, sufferers and their families alike agree that few recover as completely as Nash - or manage to live successfully with the illness - without a strong desire to reconnect with the everyday world of reality. Even today, Nash sometimes finds himself slipping into the old mode of thought. Sometimes he even hears the old voices. But now, he is able to ignore them. "It's like a continuous process rather than waking up from a dream," he has said. Nash never returned to teaching, but he began doing mathematics again. After he won the Nobel prize in 1994, Princeton gave him an office and a research stipend, and, recently the National Science Foundation awarded him a research grant. Other laureates fly first class, make investments, or start charities with their prize money.

For Nash, the most prized emoluments are simpler: spending a couple of bucks on a cup of coffee at Starbucks, getting a driver's license, and, most important, providing for his family once more. This once self-involved man has remarried the woman who saved him, cares for the son who is ill, and expresses hope that his story "helps to reduce the stigma against people with mental illness". "A second take!" he quipped before kissing Alicia again for the camera at their wedding last year. "Just like a movie." · A Beautiful Mind by Sylvia Naser is published by Faber.

Nobel prizewinning mathematician whose life was depicted in the film A Beautiful Mind Published: 25 May 2015 Nash and wife Alicia killed in taxi crash on New Jersey Turnpike, as actor Russell Crowe salutes ‘beautiful minds, beautiful hearts’ Published: 25 May 2015 Having solved some of the great theoretical problems and battled mental illness, the remarkable mathematician’s death in a car accident seems all the more tragic Published: 24 May 2015 Today King Harald of Norway will present John Nash and Louis Nirenberg with the £500,000 Abel Prize, one of the top honours in mathematics.

Here Norwegian mathematician and TV presenter Jo Røislien explains their groundbreaking work Published: 19 May 2015 John Nash, mathematician - obituary - Telegraph John Nash, mathematician - obituary Mathematician whose work informed political strategies and whose life inspired Hollywood John Nash attending a so-called 'Meeting for Extraordinary Minds' in Brescia, Italy, in 2008 Photo: EPA/FILIPPO VENEZIA 7:26PM BST 24 May 2015 John Nash, the mathematician, who has died aged 86, shared the 1994 Nobel Prize in Economics for what he claimed was his “most trivial work” — a 27-page dissertation, “Non‑Cooperative Games”, written in 1950 when he was just 21. By his own estimation – and that of the mathematical world – his contributions in the arcane field of pure mathematics (for which there is no Nobel Prize) were more remarkable still. As an undergraduate, he had inadvertently (and independently) proved Brouwer’s fixed point theorem, a problem which had baffled mathematicians since the 19th century.

A few years later he astounded the profession by solving an equally difficult problem involving equations that are used to describe orbits, air flows and similar phenomena. Games of strategy, computer architecture, the shape of the universe, the geometry of imaginary space, the mystery of prime numbers — all engaged his wide-ranging imagination. Russell Crow as John Nash in A Beautiful Mind (Film Stills) But to the public at large Nash became best-known as the subject of A Beautiful Mind (1998), the biography by Sylvia Nasar that was adapted into a Hollywood film, starring Russell Crowe, in 2002. The book revealed how Nash, the brilliant mathematician, had lived in the shadow of a condition diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenia and was virtually incapacitated by the disease for two decades. Seen from the perspective of pure mathematics, Nash’s prize work was an ingenious but not surprising application of well known methods. Yet in terms of application to other branches of human knowledge his thesis on non-cooperative games was nothing short of revolutionary. The field of game theory emanates from studies of games such as chess or poker, in which players have to devise a strategy based on expected counter-moves from the other player or players.

Such strategic interactions also characterise many situations in life, and game theory has therefore proved useful in a variety of fields. The foundations for the theory were laid in a monumental study by John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern called Theory of Games and Economic Behaviour (1944). Nash was the first to emphasise a distinction between cooperative games, as studied by von Neumann and Morgenstern (where the participants negotiate with one another) and non-cooperative games, where there is no such negotiation. He also turned from von Neumann’s concept of games of “pure rivalries”, in which one side’s gain is the other’s loss, to games where the interest of the participants is in mutual gain. Nash suggested an equilibrium point at which no one player can improve his outcome by changing his strategy alone. By clever application of mathematics, he showed that at least one equilibrium point always exists at which no player can do better than the others are doing. Over the years, Nash’s theory led to fundamental changes in economics and political science, affecting a range of fields from nuclear strategy to contract talks in major league sports.

John Nash in Madrid in 2008 (EPA/EMILIO NARANJO) For example, when the American government in 1994 sold off large portions of the electromagnetic spectrum to commercial users, a multiple-round procedure was designed according to Nash’s equilibrium theory to maximise both the revenues to the government and the utility of the purchased wavelengths to the respective buyers. The result was highly successful, bringing more than $10 billion to the government while guaranteeing an efficient allocation of resources. By contrast, however, a similar auction carried out in New Zealand without such a careful design, turned out to be a disaster in which the government only realised about 15 per cent of its expected earnings, and the wavelengths were not efficiently distributed. Another application of the Nash equilibrium theory has been in the field of population genetics and evolutionary biology, where it has been used to explain and predict competition between different species or within a species, or competition between genes. John Forbes Nash was born on June 13 1928 at Bluefield, West Virginia, a booming railroad town in Appalachia. His father was an electrical engineer working for the Appalachian Electric Power Company and his mother was a schoolteacher.

Surrounded by close relations, he had a happy family life, yet John grew up a solitary and awkward little boy who had little interest in playing with other children. His teachers did not recognise his genius – bored by his lessons, he gave them little reason to. They were more conscious of his lack of social skills and, because of this, labelled him as backward. By the age of 12, however, he was showing great interest in carrying out scientific experiments in his room at home. He entered Bluefield College in 1941 and first showed an interest in mathematics when he was about 14 years old after reading E T Bell’s Men of Mathematics. Inspired by the book, he tried, and succeeded, in proving for himself Fermat’s theorem. He did not, however, consider a career in mathematics at the time, assuming he would follow his father’s footsteps into electrical engineering. Nash won a scholarship to the Carnegie Institute of Technology, to study Chemical Engineering. Soon, however, his professors recognised his remarkable mathematical talents and persuaded him to specialise in mathematics. He received a BA and an MA in Mathematics in 1948.

When he applied for graduate school, one of his professors wrote only one line on his letter of recommendation: “This man is a genius.” He was accepted to study for a doctorate at Harvard, Princeton, Chicago and Michigan; when Princeton offered him the most prestigious fellowship it had, Nash made his decision to study there. Russell Crow as John Nash in A Beautiful Mind (Film Stills) At Princeton, Nash showed an interest in a broad range of pure mathematics, topology, algebraic geometry, game theory and logic, but he avoided attending lectures and seldom read books, preferring not to learn mathematics “second-hand”. Instead, he worked things out from first principles, while pacing endlessly, whistling Bach, or riding bicycles in tight concentric circles. In 1950, Nash received his doctorate from Princeton with his thesis, “Non-Cooperative Games”. In the summer of that year he worked for the RAND Corporation, an ultra-secret nuclear think-tank in Santa Monica, California, where his work on game theory made him a leading expert on Cold War military and diplomatic strategy, which dominated RAND’s work. Back at Princeton in the autumn of 1950, he began to work seriously on pure mathematical problems.

In 1952 he published “Real Algebraic Manifolds” in the Annals of Mathematics, a work that established him as one of the world’s leading mathematicians. Yet, though he more than qualified to join the Princeton Mathematics Faculty, there was resistance from some mathematicians who objected to his aggressive personality. Instead, from 1952, Nash taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, but his teaching was unusual (and unpopular with students) and his examining methods highly unorthodox. His mathematical achievements during this period were extraordinary and prolific. Important papers published at this time included “C1 isometric imbeddings” (1954), “The imbedding problem for Riemannian manifolds” (1956) and “Continuity of solutions of parabolic and elliptic equations” (1958). The outstanding results which Nash obtained in the course of a few years made him a celebrity in the mathematical community and put him into contention for a 1958 Fields’ Medal. But his work on parabolic and elliptic equations was still unpublished when the committee made their choice, and he was passed over. Before the next round of awards, Nash’s career had been destroyed.

During his time at MIT Nash’s personal life became complicated. He met Eleanor Stier and they had a son, born in June 1953. Nash did not want to marry Eleanor although she tried hard to persuade him. Then, in the summer of 1954, while working for RAND, Nash was arrested in a police operation to trap homosexuals. He was dismissed from RAND. One of Nash’s students at MIT, Alicia Larde, became friendly with him and by the summer of 1955 they were seeing each other regularly. In 1956 Nash’s parents found out about his affair with Eleanor and about his illegitimate son, and his father died soon after. In February 1957 Nash married Alicia and by the autumn of 1958 she was pregnant. But Nash’s behaviour was becoming increasingly eccentric. On New Year’s Eve 1958 he appeared at a fancy dress party wearing a nappy and spent the night sitting on Alicia’s lap, alternately sucking a dummy and taking swigs from a baby’s bottle of milk laced with bourbon.

John Nash (standing) in his youth, with Alicia to his immediate left One morning, he walked into the MIT common room carrying a copy of The New York Times which he declared, to no one in particular, contained encrypted messages from another galaxy that only he could decipher. The chairman of Chicago University’s Mathematics Department, eager to woo Nash to his faculty, was surprised to be informed that Nash would be unable to accept because he was “scheduled to become the Emperor of Antarctica”. Then, in February 1959, he gave a lecture which degenerated into a disjointed series of non sequiturs, and it became clear that something was horribly wrong. As psychiatrists later determined, he was suffering his first episode of paranoid schizophrenia, the most devastating of all mental illnesses, and one which is generally seen as an unremitting life sentence. Nash recalled thinking that “the staff at my university, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and later all of Boston, were behaving strangely towards me. I started to see crypto-communists everywhere. I started to think I was a man of great religious importance, and to hear voices all the time. I began to hear something like telephone calls in my head, from people opposed to my ideas.

The delirium was like a dream from which I seemed never to awake.” As a consequence of these delusions, he resigned his position at MIT and, after spending 50 days under “observation” in hospital, travelled to Europe where he “attempted to gain status as a refugee”. For the next two decades or so, he was virtually incapacitated by the disease, believing himself, at various times, to be the foot of God, a Japanese shogun, Job, a Palestinian refugee named Corpse, and Saturn. Alicia finally divorced Nash in 1963, though she continued to help him. In 1970, when he wrote to her begging her to save him from further spells in hospital, she agreed to shelter him. She became convinced that his only hope lay in living a quiet life in the heart of the mathematical community, and with the help of some of his former colleagues, she arranged for him to be given access to the mathematics department at Princeton. There, he became a sad, ghostly character shuffling about on the campus in purple trainers and occasionally writing numerology treatises on blackboards. He became known to students as “The Phantom of Fine Hall”.

Then, miraculously, in the early 1970s the disease began to wear off, and Nash was able to return to his work. He resumed his studies on game theory and lectured at mathematics and economics meetings. When members of the Swedish Academy of Science sat down to consider the candidates for the 1994 Nobel Prize in Economics, Nash was almost voted down, hours before it was announced, by members who could not bear the notion of bestowing the honour on a “madman”. In the event, though, Nash won the day, sharing the Nobel Prize for work he had done some 45 years previously. John Nash and his wife Alicia at the 2002 Oscars In 1996, he delivered a paper at the 10th World Congress of Psychiatry, in which he claimed that there was a conspicuous link between madness and mathematical genius. Rationality, he believed, often interfered with the ultra-logical thinking necessary for pure mathematics. If being “cured” meant he could no longer do any original work at that level, then, Nash argued, a remission might not be worthwhile. When working on the film A Beautiful Mind, the actor Russell Crowe invited Nash to tea.

“Do you want coffee or tea?” the actor asked, innocently. “If I have a cup of tea,” replied Nash, “how can I be sure it is going to be of the density and fullness of flavour that I actually enjoy, because Sri Lankan teas, south Indian teas, are not necessarily to my palate. I prefer north Indian teas.” The exchange found its way into the film almost verbatim. Nash professed to enjoy the film, although he commented: “It’s not me.” John and Alicia Nash remarried in 2001. They were both killed in a car accident in New Jersey. He is survived by his two sons. John Nash, born June 13 1928, died May 23 2015.

Beautiful Mind's John Nash and wife killed in New Jersey taxi crash | Daily Mail Online Next Beautiful Mind mathematician John Nash and his wife killed in New Jersey taxi crash: Tributes flood in for Princeton professor Mathematician John Nash, 86, has been killed in a taxi crash on the New Jersey Turnpike along with his wife Alicia, 82 The pair were not wearing seltbelts and were ejected from the vehicle when their driver allegedly lost control and hit the guard rail Nash was widely regarded as one of the great mathematicians of the 20th century He was best known for his work on game theory and his struggle with paranoid schizophrenia The Nobel Prize winner was famously portrayed by Russell Crowe in the 2001 Hollywood movie A Beautiful Mind which won four Oscars ‎A Beautiful Mind (2001) directed by Ron Howard • Reviews, film + cast • Letterboxd This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth. "So what am I now, a spy?" Not only did I manage not to have this movie spoiled for me, but despite it being a favorite of my father's and girlfriend's I managed to block out the knowledge that there was even anything to spoil about it.

Before the movie started my dad even said something along the lines of, "It's never the same as the first time you see it." Thank you, brain, for selectively understanding the world around me. There's a section of this movie which is absolutely terrifying to me, more than any horror movie I've ever seen. A Beautiful Mind plays out the idea that you can't think your way out of mental illness. There's a… 3 A Beautiful Mind is a beautiful film. Russell Crowe somehow looked much younger in this than he did in Gladiator which came out a year before. This movie was so wonderful and really plays with the audience's feelings. I was either really happy, really surprised, or really concerned. A film that directors in present cinema should make more of. I love stories about characters like this, and really would like to see more! Review by Dave ★★★★ Before "Noah" came along, Russell Crowe and Jennifer Connelly owned this highly entertaining drama about the life of John Nash. Rather than play it like a straight biopic, Ron Howard chose to go inside Nash’s schizophrenic mind, and the results are dazzling. Crowe, disappearing once again, adds another enigmatic role to his roster of great performances.

He should have won Oscars for "The Insider" and this film, not for "Gladiator," but I digress. He's easily one of our best actors-slash-movie stars in the business. And Jennifer Connelly? Well, dammit, she can do no wrong, can she? Review by Jye Briscoe ★★★½ I really had not much of an idea of what Ron Howard's best picture winner A Beautiful Mind was about before I caught it on TV tonight. It really is an interesting look into schizophrenia and the effect that it has on the subject and the people around them. I had little to no knowledge of John Nash, whose life this film is based on, before watching it tonight, so I can't comment on the accuracy of it all, but it's certainly a well made movie. Review by Ben Riley ★★★½ Not entirely above charges of pandering but on the whole this is an elegantly directed and compelling representation of a man's struggle with schizophrenia and the need for a patient and understanding community in battling mental illness. Jennifer Connelly can make a grown man cry.

January 7/31 John Nash - brilliant mathematician who revolutionised modelling of economics and business | afr.com John Nash - brilliant mathematician who revolutionised modelling of economics and business Share Player help icon Explainer: Nash's game theory legacy John Nash, the mathematician, who died on the weekend, in a car accident, shared the 1994 Nobel Prize in Economics for what he claimed was his "most trivial work" - a 27-page dissertation, "Non-Co-operative Games", written in 1950 when he was just 21. By his own estimation - and that of the mathematical world - his contributions in the arcane field of pure mathematics (for which there is no Nobel Prize) were more remarkable still. As an undergraduate, he had inadvertently (and independently) proved Brouwer's fixed point theorem, a problem which had baffled mathematicians since the 19th century. But to the public at large Nash became best-known as the subject of A Beautiful Mind (1998), the biography by Sylvia Nasar that was adapted into a Hollywood film, starring Russell Crowe, in 2002.

The book revealed how Nash, the brilliant mathematician, had lived in the shadow of a condition diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenia and was virtually incapacitated by the disease for two decades. Seen from the perspective of pure mathematics, Nash's prize work was an ingenious but not surprising application of well known methods. Yet in terms of application to other branches of human knowledge his thesis on non-co-operative games was nothing short of revolutionary. Professor John Nash, winner of the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, was conferred an honorary doctorate of science at the City University of Hong Kong in late Nobember 2011.\ AFP The field of game theory emanates from studies of games such as chess or poker in which players have to devise a strategy based on expected counter-moves from the other player or players. Such strategic interactions also characterise many situations in life, and game theory has therefore proved useful in a variety of fields. Related Quotes View all announcements The foundations for the theory were laid in a monumental study by John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern called Theory of Games and Economic Behaviour (1944).

Nash was the first to emphasise a distinction between cooperative games, as studied by von Neumann and Morgenstern (where the participants negotiate with one another) and non-cooperative games, where there is no such negotiation. He also turned from von Neumann's concept of games of "pure rivalries", in which one side's gain is the other's loss, to games where the interest of the participants is in mutual gain. Nash suggested an equilibrium point at which no one player can improve his outcome by changing his strategy alone. By clever application of mathematics, he showed that at least one equilibrium point always exists at which no player can do better than the others are doing. Over the years, Nash's theory led to fundamental changes in economics and political science, affecting a range of fields from nuclear strategy to contract talks in major league sports. For example, when the American government in 1994 sold off large portions of the electromagnetic spectrum to commercial users, a multiple-round procedure was designed according to Nash's equilibrium theory to maximise both the revenues to the government and the utility of the purchased wavelengths to the respective buyers. The result was highly successful, bringing more than $10 billion to the government while guaranteeing an efficient allocation of resources.

By contrast, however, a similar auction carried out in New Zealand without such a careful design, turned out to be a disaster in which the government only realised about 15 per cent of its expected earnings and the wavelengths were not efficiently distributed. Another application of the Nash equilibrium theory has been in the field of population genetics and evolutionary biology, where it has been used to explain and predict competition between different species or within a species, or competition between genes. Nash equilibriums exist everywhere. Two magazines might charge the same price so that each may achieve maximum profit. Two rival nations might agree to arms treaties that limit each of their stockpiles but guarantee both countries a measure of security. The utility of Nash's work had limitations. One is that rivals frequently do not fully know each other's strategies, as his theories assumed. Another limitation is that in many cases, there is not a single possible outcome for a conflict but rather many potential outcomes. Game theorists John Harsanyi and Reinhard Selten shared with Nash the 1994 Nobel Prize for contributions in those areas of the field.

The prize citation recognized all three men for their "pioneering analysis." Nash was described as having insights before he could hammer out the proofs of their accuracy, the thoughts coming to him more like revelations than like scholarly findings. As early as 1958, Fortune magazine had ranked him among the greatest mathematicians of the era. "Everyone else would climb a peak by looking for a path somewhere on the mountain," Nasar quoted a former colleague as saying. "Nash would climb another mountain altogether and from a distant peak would shine a searchlight back on the first peak." Nash entered Bluefield College in 1941 and first showed an interest in mathematics when he was about 14 years old after reading ET Bell's Men of Mathematics. Inspired by the book, he tried, and succeeded, in proving for himself Fermat's theorem. He did not, however, consider a career in mathematics at the time, assuming he would follow his father's footsteps into electrical engineering.

When he applied for graduate school, one of his professors, wrote only one line on his letter of recommendation: "This man is a genius." At Princeton, Nash showed an interest in a broad range of pure mathematics, topology, algebraic geometry, game theory and logic, but he avoided attending lectures and seldom read books, preferring not to learn mathematics "second-hand". Instead, he worked things out from first principles, while pacing endlessly, whistling Bach, or riding bicycles in tight concentric circles. In 1950, Nash received his doctorate from Princeton with his thesis, "Non-Cooperative Games". In the summer of that year he worked for the RAND Corporation, an ultra-secret nuclear think-tank in Santa Monica, California, where his work on game theory made him a leading expert on Cold War military and diplomatic strategy which dominated RAND's work. Back at Princeton in the autumn of 1950, he began to work seriously on pure mathematical problems. In 1952 he published "Real Algebraic Manifolds" in the Annals of Mathematics, a work that established him as one of the world's leading mathematicians.

Yet, though he more than qualified to join the Princeton Mathematics Faculty, there was resistance from some mathematicians who objected to his aggressive personality. The outstanding results which Nash obtained in the course of a few years made him a celebrity in the mathematical community and put him into contention for a 1958 Fields' Medal. But his work on parabolic and elliptic equations was still unpublished when the committee made their choice, and he was passed over. Before the next round of awards, Nash's career had been destroyed. During his time at MIT Nash's personal life became complicated. He met Eleanor Stier and they had a son, born in June 1953. Nash did not want to marry Eleanor although she tried hard to persuade him. Then, in the summer of 1954, while working for RAND, Nash was arrested in a police operation to trap homosexuals. He was dismissed from RAND. One of Nash's students at MIT, Alicia Larde, became friendly with him and by the summer of 1955 they were seeing each other regularly.

One morning, he walked into the MIT common room carrying a copy of the New York Times which he declared, to no one in particular, contained encrypted messages from another galaxy that only he could decipher. The chairman of Chicago University's Mathematics Department, eager to woo Nash to his faculty, was surprised to be informed that Nash would be unable to accept because he was "scheduled to become the Emperor of Antarctica". Then in February 1959, he gave a lecture which degenerated into a disjointed series of non sequiturs, and it became clear that something was horribly wrong. As psychiatrists later determined, he was suffering his first episode of paranoid schizophrenia, the most devastating of all mental illnesses, and one which is generally seen as an unremitting life sentence. Nash recalled thinking that "the staff at my university, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and later all of Boston, were behaving strangely towards me. I started to see crypto-Communists everywhere. As a consequence of these delusions, he resigned his position at MIT and, after spending 50 days under "observation" in hospital, travelled to Europe where he "attempted to gain status as a refugee".

For the next two decades or so, he was virtually incapacitated by the disease, believing himself, at various times, to be the foot of God, a Japanese shogun, Job, a Palestinian refugee named Corpse, and Saturn. Alicia finally divorced Nash in 1963, though she continued to help him. In 1970, when he wrote to her begging her to save him from further spells in hospital, she agreed to shelter him. She became convinced that his only hope lay in living a quiet life in the heart of the mathematical community, and with the help of some of his former colleagues, she arranged for him to be given access to the mathematics department at Princeton. Then, miraculously, in the early 1970s the disease began to wear off, and Nash was able to return to his work. He resumed his studies on game theory and lectured at mathematics and economics meetings. When members of the Swedish Academy of Science sat down to consider the candidates for the 1994 Nobel Prize in Economics, Nash was almost voted down hours before it was announced, by members who could not bear the notion of bestowing the honour on a madman.

When working on the film A Beautiful Mind, the actor Russell Crowe invited Nash to tea. "Do you want coffee or tea?" the actor asked, innocently. "If I have a cup of tea," replied Nash, "how can I be sure it is going to be of the density and fullness of flavour that I actually enjoy, because Sri Lankan teas, south Indian teas, are not necessarily to my palate. I prefer north Indian teas." The exchange found its way into the film almost verbatim. Nash professed to enjoy the film, although he commented: "It's not me". John and Alicia Nash remarried in 2001. They were both killed in the car accident in on the weekend. With the Washington Post John Nash, Who Inspired A Beautiful Mind, Dies in Car Crash With Wife Alicia?Read Russell Crowe's Moving Tribute | E! News Canada Email Getty Images; Universal Pictures John Nash, a Nobel Prize-winning mathematician whose life story inspired the movie A Beautiful Mind, and his wife Alicia Nash were killed in a taxi cab crash on Saturday in New Jersey.

They were mourned online by Russell Crowe , who played the man in Ron Howard 's 2001 film, which won four Oscars and earned the actor a nomination for his leading role. "Stunned...my heart goes out to John & Alicia & family," Crowe said on Twitter on Sunday. "An amazing partnership. Beautiful minds, beautiful hearts." PHOTOS: Russell Crowe meets Pope Francis John, born, John Forbes Nash Jr., was 86 and his wife was 82. The two were riding in a taxi cab near the New Jersey Turnpike when their driver lost control of the Ford Crown Victoria while trying to pass a Chrysler. Both cars crashed a guard rail and the Nashes were ejected, NJ.com reported. A police officer told the outlet that "it doesn't appear that they were wearing seatbelts." The taxi driver was cut out of the wreckage and was hospitalized with non-life-threatening injuries, while a passenger in the Chrysler was treated for neck pain, the officer told NJ.com. John won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1994 for his work in game theory and worked as a senior research mathematician at Princeton University. A Beautiful Mind also depicted his battle with paranoid schizophrenia.

His wife, who Jennifer Connelly played in A Beautiful Mind, was his caretaker. "This is a great loss," the actress said in a statement. "John and Alicia Nash were an inspiration and I have deep admiration for all that they accomplished in their lives. My thoughts are with their family." Howard also paid tribute to the couple. RIP Brilliant #NobelPrize winning John Nash & and his remarkable wife Alicia. It was an honor telling part of their story #ABeautifulMind — Ron Howard (@RealRonHoward) May 24, 2015 The two wed in 1957 and divorced in 1963. They remarried in 2001. Their son, also named John, was born in 1959 and is now 56. The Nobel Prize laureate is also survived by a 61-year-old son, also named John, from a previous relationship. —Additional reporting by Lindsay Good Brazil E! Is Everywhere This content is available customized for our international audience. Would you like to view this in our US edition? E! Is Everywhere This content is available customized for our international audience. Would you like to view this in our Canadian edition? E!

Is Everywhere This content is available customized for our international audience. Would you like to view this in our UK edition? E! Is Everywhere This content is available customized for our international audience. Would you like to view this in our Australian edition? E! ist überall Dieser Inhalt ist für internationale Besucher verfügbar. Möchtest du ihn in der deutschen Version anschauen? E! Is Everywhere This content is available customized for our international audience. Would you like to view this in our German edition? E! est partout Une version adaptée de ce contenu est disponible pour notre public international. Souhaitez-vous voir ça dans notre édition française ? E! Is Everywhere This content is available customized for our international audience. Would you like to view this in our French edition? Yes! 'Beautiful Mind' mathematician John Nash dies in crash - CNN.com No charges have been filed in the accident, which is still under investigation, Williams said. A woman 'essential to his survival' Nash, widely regarded as one of the greatest mathematicians of the 20th century, was known for his work in game theory, and his personal struggle with paranoid schizophrenia.

Alicia Nash, an MIT physics major from an aristocratic Salvadoran family, has been credited with saving his life after schizophrenia derailed his career in the 1960s, letting him into her home and looking after him even after they divorced in 1963. As the couple's biographer, Sylvia Nasar , wrote in the 1998 book "A Beautiful Mind," "It was Nash's genius ... to choose a woman who would prove so essential to his survival." That chapter of their relationship did not make it into the Hollywood version of their lives, the 2001 Oscar-winning film "A Beautiful Mind" starring Russell Crowe and Jennifer Connelly. The film, which has been called "a piece of historical revisionism," also left out his child from a previous relationship and glossed over his reputation for being difficult to work with. But it drew accolades for its depiction of mental illness while bringing attention to Nash's accomplishments, which earned him the 1994 Nobel Prize in Economics. Nash called the film an "artistic" interpretation based on his life of how mental illness could evolve -- one that did not "describe accurately" the nature of his delusions or treatment.

Unlike Crowe's character, who comes to rely on medication for treatment, Nash said in a 1994 interview it had been decades since he had taken medication. He spoke of mental illness as often having "an unfavorable course with history in the sense that people never really recovered to what you can call mentally well. They become what are called consumers of mental health organizations. They are always taking some sort of a pill." News of the couple's deaths drew tributes from academia and Hollywood. "We are stunned and saddened by news of the untimely passing of John Nash and his wife and great champion, Alicia. Both of them were very special members of the Princeton University community," Princeton University President Christopher L. Eisgruber said. "John's remarkable achievements inspired generations of mathematicians, economists and scientists who were influenced by his brilliant, groundbreaking work in game theory, and the story of his life with Alicia moved millions of readers and moviegoers who marveled at their courage in the face of daunting challenges," Eisgruber added. "RIP Brilliant #NobelPrize winning John Nash & and his remarkable wife Alicia. It was an honor telling part of their story #ABeautifulMind," director Ron Howard tweeted .

Crowe expressed condolences to the family on Twitter , calling the couple an "amazing partnership" with "beautiful minds" and "beautiful hearts." Stunned...my heart goes out to John & Alicia & family. An amazing partnership. Beautiful minds, beautiful hearts. — Ron Howard (@RealRonHoward) May 24, 2015 'This man is a genius' Nash was born in 1928, in Bluefield, West Virginia, a former coal town in the Appalachian Mountains. The son of an engineer and a Latin teacher, he began showing signs of mathematical talent in elementary school. He was one of 10 winners of the George Westinghouse Award, which got him a full scholarship to the Carnegie Institute of Technology, where he first earned the label genius, according to Nasar , his biographer. He so impressed one professor that his letter of recommendation for Princeton had just one line: "This man is a genius." Nash received his doctorate from Princeton in 1950 based on a dissertation on the fields of mathematics and economics.

In 1951, he joined the faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, where he met his future wife, Alicia Larde, a student in his advanced calculus class. The daughter of a doctor, Larde's extended family "hobnobbed with the intelligentsia of El Salvador" before arriving in the United States in 1944. One of 16 women to enter the MIT class of 1955, a classmate described her as "an El Salvadoran princess with a sense of noblesse oblige." JUST WATCHED MUST WATCH 1994: John Nash talks about the future of mankind 01:08 They became a couple after spending time together in the university's music library, where Larde worked. "He was very, very good looking, very intelligent," Alicia Nash told Nasar . "It was a little bit of a hero worship thing." Nash began to experience what he called "the mental disturbances" in the early months of 1959, when Alicia Nash was pregnant, he wrote in his Nobel biography . Consequently, he resigned from his position as an MIT faculty member and spent 50 days under observation at the McLean Hospital in Massachusetts.

He spent the next few years in and out of hospitals, "always on an involuntary basis and always attempting a legal argument for release," he said -- despite Alicia Nash's efforts to keep him hospitalized. During periods of mental clarity, in which he was able to renounce his "delusional hypotheses," he returned to research that built his reputation as one of the most influential American mathematicians of his time. In addition to the Nobel, Nash received the John von Neumann Theory Prize in 1978 and the American Mathematical Society's Steele Prize for a Seminal Contribution to Research (1999). Just last week, he was in Norway to accept the 2015 Abel Prize for mathematical contributions with longtime colleague Louis Nirenberg. Nirenberg called Nash's death a "horrible loss" especially considering "the wonderful week" they had just shared. "He was truly a great mathematician, a most remarkable mathematician," Nirenberg said. "He made deep contributions with every paper he wrote." "His wife was also a wonderful person. She looked after him after all these years. She was very special." The couple stayed together through it all, marrying for a second time in 2001.

"We thought it would be a good idea," Alicia Nash said in a PBS documentary . "After all, we've been together most of our lives." Photos: People we lost in 2015

Question: In which film does Russell Crowe play 'John Nash', a mathematician who worked at MIT and Princeton?
Answer: 'A BEAUTIFUL MIND'